Scientific Delirium Madness Gallery

Leonardo Galler y Scientific Delirium Madness Djerassi Resident Artists Program Executive Director Margot H. Knight describes the genesis and ultimate success of the inaugural edition of Scientific Delirium Madness, a collaborative initiative of Leonardo/ISAST and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. At the heart of Scientific Delirium Madness is a month-long residency that brings together artists and scientists at the Djerassi 585-acre retreat in the coastal Santa Cruz Mountains to explore and transform the boundaries of art and science. Three years ago, when I had just landed at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (DRAP), I met performance artist Nina Wise and mathematician Ralph Abraham—alumni of the program who had incubated their play on Johannes Kepler while in residence together in 2006. I also met the late Carl Djerassi, the program’s co-founder, who coupled his knowledge of science and writing. He had coined a term: “science in theater.” A snowball of an idea formed: What if we devoted a 30-day live/work residency to bringing artists and scientists together to live, work and explore the universe? What would happen? What could happen? Because of Carl Djerassi’s work in art and science, this sort of collaboration had happened a few times in the program’s history. In addition to Wise and Abraham, Nobel Laureate and theoretical chemist Roald Hoffmann once wrote dozens of poems while in residence. But what if we deliberately selected a group of scientists with demonstrated interest in art and artists whose muses were informed by science? Meetings with Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) founder and cultural historian Piero Scaruffi [1] and an introduction, via Leonardo Executive Editor Roger Malina, to the extraordinary work of Leonardo/ISAST sealed the deal. With the perfect partner in Leonardo, Scientific Delirium Madness was born. We formed a project steering committee and developed criteria for selecting artists and scientists. We recruited a prestigious group of nominators from across the country. Over 200 artists and scientists applied or were nominated. Twelve scientists and artists (or teams) said “yes” to our experiment [2]. Leonardo/ISAST secured a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts via the agency’s new Science and Art initiative. We announced the participants at a D.C. Art and Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER) [3], organized by the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences, in the spring of 2014. On 1 July 2014 the experiment began. Some residents had previously partnered on projects, but most were strangers to one another. On 30 July, they left as friends and, even more importantly, as professional colleagues. They not only shared what they did with one another but how they worked out problems and thought about the big questions. The dinner table levitated nightly with ideas. Residents bonded over chaos theory, life on Mars, acoustics, pattern recognition, dance and the possibilities of 3D television. During the residency, they shared their work with the public at our annual Open House and through blog entries posted on Leonardo On-Line [4]. So, what’s next? Our admission panel has selected the 2015 residents from over 225 applicants. Joining us will be Natalie Jeremijenko, Simona Zompi, Rachel Mayeri, Karl Schaffer, Eathan Janney, Eleni Sikelianos, Allison Cobb, Caroline Wellbery, Luca Forcusi, Guillermo Munoz and Tami Spector—artists and scientists from three countries and five states. Who knows what will happen? What could happen . . . margot h. knight Executive Director, Djerassi Resident Artists Program Email: <margot@djerassi.org> Web: <www.djerassi.org> Acknowledgment CA); Donna Sternberg, choreographer (Santa Monica, CA); Ari Frankel, composer (New York, NY); Charlotte Jacobs, writer (Stanford, CA); Pireeni Sundaralingam, poet and cognitive scientist (San Francisco, CA); Devavani Chatterjea, biologist (Saint Paul, MN); Jim Crutchfield, physicist (Davis, CA); Curtis Frank, chemical engineer (Stanford, CA); Natalie Jeremijenko, engineer and artist (New York, NY); Budi Prakosa, industrial engineer (Bogor, Indonesia); Andreas Siagian, industrial engineer (Bogor, Indonesia); and Dawn Sumner, geobiologist (Davis, CA). This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Leonardo/ISAST thanks the NEA for its support, which has enabled LASER series events, publication of the Leonardo Gallery, the Leonardo On-Line blog and documentation of the Scientific Delirium Madness residency. References and Notes 1 Piero Scaruffi founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous series on behalf of Leonardo/ISAST in 2008. LASER events in 2014 and 2015 have featured Scientific Delirium Madness residents. 2 The participating artists and scientists were: Sasha Petrenko, media artist (Richmond, CA); Meredith Tromble, media artist (Oakland, ©2015 ISAST doi:10.1162/LEON_e_01023 3 DASER is a monthly forum on art-science projects in the national capital region and beyond. DASER is co-sponsored by Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and Leonardo/ ISAST and is a “sister” event series to LASER. 4 To view the Leonardo blog posts, see <www.leonardo.info/blogs/>. LEONARDO, Vol. 48, No. 3, pp. 219–225, 2015 219 SCIENTIFIC DELIRIUM MADNESS GALLERY JONAS SALK Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs On 12 April 1955, when the world learned that Jonas Salk’s vaccine could prevent poliomyelitis, he became an international hero overnight. Revered by the public, he was snubbed by the scientific community—the one group whose praise he craved. Salk’s historic role in preventing polio overshadowed his part in co-developing the first influenza vaccine, his pioneering work on AIDS, and his efforts to meld the sciences and humanities in the Salk Institute. It is this latter part of Salk’s life that I focused on during Scientific Delirium Madness. In 1959, Sir C. P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures” became Salk’s bible. Salk agreed that literary intellectuals and scientists rarely communicated, and when they did it was often adversarial. Lawmakers rarely considered scientific implications when setting public policy; scientists didn’t necessarily consider mankind’s well being in their research endeavors. “I felt there ought to be a place,” Salk said, “for biological studies but which also contained the conscience of man.” Searching for a site whose natural beauty stimulated harmony, he chose La Jolla, California, where Louis Kahn built an architectural masterpiece. Although the Salk Institute is considered one of the premier research institutes, Salk felt sad that in the end science trumped humanism at his beloved Institute. As I interacted with the resident artists and scientists during Scientific Delirium Madness, sharing the creative process and witnessing collaborations, I thought about Salk’s dream. As a physician and biographer, I am grateful to the Djerassi Resident 220 Leonardo Gallery Jonas Salk all but eradicated polio from the face of the Earth, and the scientific community never forgave him. (Image courtesy of Jonas Salk Papers, Mandeville Special Collections and Archives, UC San Diego) Artists Program (DRAP), the Patricia E. Bashaw and Eugene Segre Fellowship, and Leonardo for their efforts to blend the two cultures. That month I could sense Jonas Salk walking between the Artist’s Barn and Middlebrook Writing Studios saying, “Yes, this is what I was striving for.” Jonas Salk: A Life was released by Oxford University Press in May 2015. Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs: Email: <cjacobs@stanford.edu>. Curtis W. Frank My path to Scientific Delirium Madness in the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (DRAP) began with an introductory sophomore seminar called “Art, Chemistry and Madness: The Science of Art Materials” that I have taught at Stanford University for the past 8 years. This course includes my lectures on the materials science of objects of art, studio lab activities led by my co-instructor Sara Loesch-Frank and behind-the-scenes access to the collection of the Cantor Arts Center with conservator Susan Roberts-Manganelli. I went “up on the mountain” intending to design a text that could teach the principles of materials science through examples provided by objects of cultural heritage. During the first two weeks of my “Gift of Time,” I concentrated on the book and on reading John Gage’s work on color theory that, prior to my time as a resident at Djerassi, had not risen high enough in priority. One of the topics that caught my attention was the CIE chromaticity scale developed in 1931 as a quantitative standard for industrial lighting. I became captivated by the possibility of abstracting this lighting standard in some physical way. I began by digging through various piles of “stuff ” on the DRAP property and collected some cast-off roof tiles and items from the woodpile. Working from the two-dimensional figure representing the lighting standard, I designed a three-dimensional object that captures some of the critical elements. The result is Chromaticity. The colors of the disks represent the fully saturated Newtonian colors, the heights of disks are related to the sensitivity of the human eye to visible light and the centrally located white oval represents the zone where appropriate combinations of colors mix to white. I had no idea that my month would lead to this. Curtis W. Frank: Email: <curt.frank@stanford.edu>. Curtis W. Frank, Chromaticity, painted cast-off roof tiles and items from a woodpile found on the premises of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, 2014. (© Curtis W. Frank. Photo: Celia Olsen.) Leonardo Gallery 221 SCIENTIFIC DELIRIUM MADNESS GALLERY CHROMATICITY SCIENTIFIC DELIRIUM MADNESS GALLERY BRIDGING DANCE AND SCIENCE Donna Sternberg Donna Sternberg performing during the Djerassi Open House, 27 July 2014. (© Donna Sternberg) I am passionate about discovery and interested in the “big questions” that deal with the human experience. I use science as a framework to give shape and structure to my artistic explorations, drawing parallels and metaphors between science and human behavior. I went to Djerassi with a few projects in mind, but in the end I found that the interactions with the other residents informed and directed the work that I did, both in planned and new projects. From casual conversations to substantive discussions about the viability and desirability of art/science projects, these interactions brought forth questions and inspiration for continuing my own journey of bridging dance and science. While attending a poetry reading by fellow resident Pireeni Sundaralingam, I was captivated by the imagery of her poem “Mussels” and inspired to choreograph to it, incorporating music by resident composer Ari Frankel. This initial collaboration has flowered into a performance of dance, poetry and music that will take place in the fall of 2015 in Culver City, CA. It will also investigate how the process of collaborating across different art forms affects the artists involved on a cognitive level. Artist Meredith Tromble and scientist Dawn Sumner were working on a 3D project that offered myriad possibilities for a dance component. Along with physicist Jim Crutchfield, who was also affiliated with the project, we discussed a collaboration that would expand the project to include dance and video. Fellow resident immunologist Devavani Chatterjea expressed an interest in collaborating on a dance based on immunology. I asked Devavani to give me some principles we could explore and she provided me with several scenarios that were ripe with imagery and movement possibilities. We have plans to develop the project incorporating dialogue between Devavani’s students and the dancers in the conceptual and creative process. Donna Sternberg: Email: <dsdancers@earthlink.net>. 222 Leonardo Gallery SCIENTIFIC DELIRIUM MADNESS GALLERY Sasha Petrenko performing scene 3 of (RE)TIME, 2014, a dance-play in development about human+nature relationships. (Image courtesy of the artist) RE(TIME) Sasha Petrenko I had planned to use my time at Djerassi to write a choral piece about hydraulic fracturing for my play Clinging to a Rock Hurtling through Space. At the time I did not know the play would be called that. I did not know a lot of things. I began by reading EPA reports, editorials and propaganda both for and against hydraulic fracturing. I found maps and deeds relating to the brief La Honda oil boom of the 1920s. After discovering the location of local wells, I took a field trip. But my navigational skills and Google maps were both spotty, and the resulting experience left me feeling lost on a number of levels. Then something told me “let the land lead you . . . ” As a by-product of my fracking research I began noticing geologic phenomena all around. Geologic time, thousands and millions of years, were visible in layers I could touch and feel. I felt like I’d found something truly profound. From this experience I developed (RE)TIME, a 20-minute performance with sound spanning all of geologic time from the planet’s birth, through several mass extinctions, up until the present day. Throughout the piece I move a small, blue sphere— representing Earth—upstage, along an imagined geologic timescale toward the audience. In the final seconds of the performance we arrive at our current geologic era, identified by significant human influence on the Earth’s lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. As the scene ends I’m stretched out on the floor reaching towards the audience and the blue sphere just out of my reach. There is stillness and silence, followed by a reading of Devavani Chatterjea’s poem “The Gift” by another performer. To learn more about Clinging to a Rock Hurtling through Space, visit <www.sashapetrenko.org>. Sasha Petrenko: Email: <sashpetrenko@ gmail.com>. Leonardo Gallery 223 SCIENTIFIC DELIRIUM MADNESS GALLERY DREAM VORTEX Meredith Tromble and Dawn Sumner Dream Vortex is an interactive, 3D, mixed-reality art installation, based on dreams collected from a visualization research community and developed for a CAVE, Oculus Rift or 3D monitor we (artist Meredith Tromble and scientist Dawn Sumner) began developing in 2011. Drawings of dream scenarios circulate in a vortex, accompanied by an abstract sound environment. A viewer interacts with the vortex by selecting dream emblems with a game controller. Once a dream is selected, the vortex disappears; the chosen dream and a suite of related dreams come into view. For the time span of a typical dream (a few minutes) the viewer can interact with them, moving, resizing and arranging them in new patterns, subject to a dreamappropriate degree of surprising, random change built into the programming. Then the vortex reappears and a new cycle begins. Dream Vortex, a collaboration between an artist and a scientist, dissolves the boundaries between seemingly Meredith Tromble and Dawn Sumner, still from Dream Vortex, interactive, 3D, mixed-reality art installation consisting of dreams, conversations, mixed-media drawings and programming, 2011–, dimensions variable. Dream fragments circulating in the Dream Vortex. (© Meredith Tromble and Dawn Sumner) 224 Leonardo Gallery opposite activities. It unites humanity’s oldest and newest image-making technologies—charcoal drawing and programming—and brings subjective questions into an objective research environment. It is also a beautiful visual and aural experience, a harbinger of the new art forms that will emerge as 3D tools become widely available to artists. Meredith Tromble and Dawn Sumner: Email: <mtromble@sfai.edu>, <dysumner@gmail.com>. Meredith Tromble and Dawn Sumner, still from Dream Vortex, interactive, 3D, mixed-reality art installation consisting of dreams, conversations, mixedmedia drawings and programming, 2011–, dimensions variable. The dream drawing Red Convertible is playfully arranged to become “blood” spurting from the drawing Monster Stomping on My Husband, as other dreams lurk in the background. (© Meredith Tromble and Dawn Sumner) SCIENTIFIC DELIRIUM MADNESS GALLERY Pireeni Sundaralingam, Pulse, Impulse, multimedia installation: wood, steel, acrylic paint, 2014. (© Pireeni Sundaralingam) PULSE, IMPULSE Pireeni Sundaralingam I am interested in making visible the invisible, particularly with reference to the mysteries of the human nervous system and the ways in which we perceive the world. I am particularly fascinated by the question of how our cognition and nervous systems mediate the way we understand and explore the space around us, and I have pursued these ideas through my training as a cognitive scientist and as a creative writer. The Scientific Delirium Madness residency allowed me the time and freedom to investigate these ideas through many further channels, including installation work. My piece Pulse, Impulse was inspired by two elements: firstly, the intersecting nature of the dialogue between the artists and scientists gathered together during the residency; and, secondly, the desire to bring into relief the physical nature of our respective nervous systems. Each wooden rod in this installation is the exact length of the longest nerve cell (the sciatic nerve) measured from the body of a particular artist or scientist at the residency. The brushed steel coils used at each node of the installation are a metaphoric representation both of synapses and of the spark of dialogue between thinkers. Pireeni Sundaralingam: Email: pireenis@ yahoo.com. Leonardo Gallery 225